Force During the Stride

An analogy of the equine front leg striking the racing surface at speed can be mimicked by slapping the palm of your hand on a car seat. The palm is the hoof and if you try this you'll understand the force that emanates up your wrist. You'll also see that the manner in which you strike your palm to the seat--i.e. a flick of or thud--definitely changes the direction and power of the force, and you'll also see the cumulative effect of the force and the fatigue with hit after hit.

I'll save you the time and relate, where you to try this experiment, you'd feel the power of the collision and also the weight of the follow through as you pull your palm on through the seat as a horse would flick it's hoof across the track. You feel a lot of power over your whole hand at the point of impact, and lesser forces going right up your wrist to your elbow and up to your shoulder.

Of course each strike of the wrist on the car seat or each flick of the hoof onto the track surface is but momentary. Below, a nice photo of a horse in flight, the only forces operating are the torsional forces of motion and whatever remains from the last ground contact.
Then the horse stretches the fronts out and up:
Superb photo of the right front hoof coming back down heel first:
Only if your on board can you understand the power with which that right front in the above photo slams into the surface. As it hits you may hear a slap or a thud, or very little depending on the hardness of the surface, but, you always feel the power of this with every stride as the horse hits heel first, pulls on through momentarily supporting it's entire weight on one leg, and then the toe leaving the ground to go back to the Street Sense shot that was the first photo.

Riding the horse at speed you can really feel and hear only the front lead leg striking the ground. Generally the hardest hit comes during the lead change when the new lead hits the ground for the first time.

Somewhere I wanted to include all this, and next post I'll get into how this all holds together.

Training:
This was the scene last night 48 hours post our farm version of the Osawatami, KS. floods. Ooops. i just erased the photo. oh well. Eureka planned for Friday. Art got his first exercise in 10 days. Just some play and a few spurts with another horse. It was still quite muddy.